1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method of providing a secure area on a media storage device, and more particularly an apparatus and method of providing a storage device with a secure section that does not require custom drivers or a specialized software package for accessing data in the secure section.
2. Description of Related Art
Although conventional technologies provide secure storage areas, these have several disadvantages. One technology uses a software package to create two partitions, a public partition that anyone can access and an encrypted partition that requires installation of specialized drivers and software for accessing the files on the encrypted partition. Another technology, such as is implemented in the USB MSC drivers supplied by Cypress Semiconductor Corporation, uses a custom driver and software application to implement the ATA Security Feature of hard drives to protect access to the entire device using a password that is stored on the hard drive itself.
Unfortunately, there are disadvantages with each of these conventional methods. For example, the technology that provides multiple partitions with one partition being encrypted requires specialized software and drivers to be installed to access files on the encrypted partition. In addition, the secure data has to be encrypted and decrypted to gain access to the files using the specialized software and drivers. Furthermore, unauthorized users could gain access to the actual data in the encrypted partition using low level disk access (sector read/write), thereby providing them with the opportunity to attempt to decrypt the data on the drive.
The technology that permits an entire disk to be protected via hardware also has disadvantages. For instance, this technology also requires specialized software and drivers to be installed in order to unprotect access to the disk. It further provides an all or nothing approach to accessing files on disk, with no separate public and secure areas. Furthermore, the hard drives have to support the ATA security feature for this method to work, and it is therefore not compatible with typical flash memory or ATAPI devices. In addition, once the hard drive is unprotected, a non-standard mechanism is required to cause the Operating System (OS) file system to re-mount the media and access the drive contents.